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In 1878, the American scholar and minister Sebastian Adams put the final touches on the third edition of his grandest project: a massive Synchronological Chart that covers nothing less than the entire history of the world in parallel, with the deeds of kings and kingdoms running along together in rows over 25 horizontal feet of paper. When the chart reaches 1500 BCE, its level of detail becomes impressive; at 400 CE it becomes eyebrow-raising; at 1300 CE it enters the realm of the wondrous. No wonder, then, that in their 2013 book Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline, authors Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton call Adams' chart "nineteenth-century America's surpassing achievement in complexity and synthetic power... a great work of outsider thinking."

The chart is also the last thing that visitors to Kentucky's Creation Museum see before stepping into the gift shop, where full-sized replicas can be purchased for $40.

Further Reading

That's because, in the world described by the museum, Adams' chart is more than a historical curio; it remains an accurate timeline of world history. Time is said to have begun in 4004 BCE with the creation of Adam, who went on to live for 930 more years. In 2348 BCE, the Earth was then reshaped by a worldwide flood, which created the Grand Canyon and most of the fossil record even as Noah rode out the deluge in an 81,000 ton wooden ark. Pagan practices at the eight-story high Tower of Babel eventually led God to cause a "confusion of tongues" in 2247 BCE, which is why we speak so many different languages today.

Adams notes on the second panel of the chart that "all the history of man, before the flood, extant, or known to us, is found in the first six chapters of Genesis."

Ken Ham agrees. Ham, CEO of Answers in Genesis (AIG), has become perhaps the foremost living young Earth creationist in the world. He has authored more books and articles than seems humanly possible and has built AIG into a creationist powerhouse. He also made national headlines when the slickly modern Creation Museum opened in 2007.

He has also been looking for the opportunity to debate a prominent supporter of evolution.

And so it was that, as a severe snow and sleet emergency settled over the Cincinnati region, 900 people climbed into cars and wound their way out toward the airport to enter the gates of the Creation Museum. They did not come for the petting zoo, the zip line, or the seasonal camel rides, nor to see the animatronic Noah chortle to himself about just how easy it had really been to get dinosaurs inside his Ark. They did not come to see The Men in White, a 22-minute movie that plays in the museum's halls in which a young woman named Wendy sees that what she's been taught about evolution "doesn't make sense" and is then visited by two angels who help her understand the truth of six-day special creation. They did not come to see the exhibits explaining how all animals had, before the Fall of humanity into sin, been vegetarians.

Further Reading

They came to see Ken Ham debate TV presenter Bill Nye the Science Guy—an old-school creation v. evolution throwdown for the Powerpoint age. Even before it began, the debate had been good for both men. Traffic to AIG's website soared by 80 percent, Nye appeared on CNN, tickets sold out in two minutes, and post-debate interviews were lined up with Piers Morgan Live and MSNBC.

While plenty of Ham supporters filled the parking lot, so did people in bow ties and "Bill Nye is my Homeboy" T-shirts. They all followed the stamped dinosaur tracks to the museum's entrance, where a pack of AIG staffers wearing custom debate T-shirts stood ready to usher them into "Discovery Hall."

Security at the Creation Museum is always tight; the museum's security force is made up of sworn (but privately funded) Kentucky peace officers who carry guns, wear flat-brimmed state trooper-style hats, and operate their own K-9 unit. For the debate, Nye and Ham had agreed to more stringent measures. Visitors passed through metal detectors complete with secondary wand screenings, packages were prohibited in the debate hall itself, and the outer gates were closed 15 minutes before the debate began.

Inside the hall, packed with bodies and the blaze of high-wattage lights, the temperature soared. The empty stage looked—as everything at the museum does—professionally designed, with four huge video screens, custom debate banners, and a pair of lecterns sporting Mac laptops. 20 different video crews had set up cameras in the hall, and 70 media organizations had registered to attend. More than 10,000 churches were hosting local debate parties. As AIG technical staffers made final preparations, one checked the YouTube-hosted livestream—242,000 people had already tuned in before start time.

An AIG official took the stage eight minutes before start time. "We know there are people who disagree with each other in this room," he said. "No cheering or—please—any disruptive behavior."

At 6:59pm, the music stopped and the hall fell silent but for the suddenly prominent thrumming of the air conditioning. For half a minute, the anticipation was electric, all eyes fixed on the stage, and then the countdown clock ticked over to 7:00pm and the proceedings snapped to life. Nye, wearing his traditional bow tie, took the stage from the left; Ham appeared from the right. The two shook hands in the center to sustained applause, and CNN's Tom Foreman took up his moderating duties.

Ham had won the coin toss backstage and so stepped to his lectern to deliver brief opening remarks. "Creation is the only viable model of historical science confirmed by observational science in today's modern scientific era," he declared, blasting modern textbooks for "imposing the religion of atheism" on students.

"We're teaching people to think critically!" he said. "It's the creationists who should be teaching the kids out there."

And we were off.

Two kinds of science

Digging in the fossil fields of Colorado or North Dakota, scientists regularly uncover the bones of ancient creatures. No one doubts the existence of the bones themselves; they lie on the ground for anyone to observe or weigh or photograph. But in which animal did the bones originate? How long ago did that animal live? What did it look like? One of Ham's favorite lines is that the past "doesn't come with tags"—so the prehistory of a stegosaurus thigh bone has to be interpreted by scientists, who use their positions in the present to reconstruct the past.

For mainstream scientists, this is simply an obvious statement of our existential position. Until a real-life Dr. Emmett "Doc" Brown finds a way to power a Delorean with a 1.21 gigawatt flux capacitor in order to shoot someone back through time to observe the flaring-forth of the Universe, the formation of the Earth, or the origins of life, or the prehistoric past can't be known except by interpretation. Indeed, this isn't true only of prehistory; as Nye tried to emphasize, forensic scientists routinely use what they know of nature's laws to reconstruct past events like murders.

For Ham, though, science is broken into two categories, "observational" and "historical," and only observational science is trustworthy. In the initial 30 minute presentation of his position, Ham hammered the point home.

"You don't observe the past directly," he said. "You weren't there."

Ham spoke with the polish of a man who has covered this ground a hundred times before, has heard every objection, and has a smooth answer ready for each one.

In Ham's world, only changes that we can observe directly are the proper domain of science. Thus, when confronted with the issue of speciation, Ham readily admits that contemporary lab experiments on fast-breeding creatures like mosquitoes can produce new species. But he says that's simply "micro-evolution" below the family level. He doesn't believe that scientists can observe "macro-evolution," such as the alteration of a lobe-finned fish into a tiger over millions of years.

Because they can't see historical events unfold, scientists must rely on reconstructions of the past. Those might be accurate, but they simply rely on too many "assumptions" for Ham to trust them. When confronted during the debate with evidence from ancient trees which have more rings than there are years on the Adams Sychronological Chart, Ham simply shrugged.

"We didn't see those layers laid down," he said.

To him, the calculus of "one ring, one year" is merely an assumption when it comes to the past—an assumption possibly altered by cataclysmic events such as Noah's flood.

In other words, "historical science" is dubious; we should defer instead to the "observational" account of someone who witnessed all past events: God, said to have left humanity an eyewitness account of the world's creation in the book of Genesis. All historical reconstructions should thus comport with this more accurate observational account.

Mainstream scientists don't recognize this divide between observational and historical ways of knowing (much as they reject Ham's distinction between "micro" and "macro" evolution). Dinosaur bones may not come with tags, but neither does observed contemporary reality—think of a doctor presented with a set of patient symptoms, who then has to interpret what she sees in order to arrive at a diagnosis.

Given that the distinction between two kinds of science provides Ham's key reason for accepting the "eyewitness account" of Genesis as a starting point, it was unsurprising to see Nye take generous whacks at the idea. You can't observe the past? "That's what we do in astronomy," said Nye in his opening presentation. Since light takes time to get here, "All we can do in astronomy is look at the past. By the way, you're looking at the past right now."

Those in the present can study the past with confidence, Nye said, because natural laws are generally constant and can be used to extrapolate into the past.

"This idea that you can separate the natural laws of the past from the natural laws you have now is at the heart of our disagreement," Nye said. "For lack of a better word, it's magical. I've appreciated magic since I was a kid, but it's not what we want in mainstream science."

How do scientists know that these natural laws are correctly understood in all their complexity and interplay? What operates as a check on their reconstructions? That's where the predictive power of evolutionary models becomes crucial, Nye said. Those models of the past should generate predictions which can then be verified—or disproved—through observations in the present.

For instance, evolutionary models suggest that land-based tetrapods can all be traced back to primitive, fish-like creatures that first made their way out of the water and onto solid ground—creatures that aren't quite lungfish and yet aren't quite amphibians. For years, there was a big gap in the fossil record around this expected transition. Then, in 2004, a research team found a number of these "fishapods" in the Canadian Arctic.

"Tiktaalik looks like a cross between the primitive fish it lived amongst and the first four-legged animals," wrote the research team as they introduced their discovery to the world.

"What we want in science—science as practiced on the outside—is the ability to predict," said Nye, pointing to the examples of Tiktaalik in biological evolution and the results of the Cosmic Background Explorer mission in cosmology. Mainstream scientific predictions, even those focused on the past, can in fact be tested against reality. So far, however, "Mr. Ham and his worldview does not have this capability," Nye said. "It cannot make predictions and show results."

An evolutionist is someone who attributes the existence of all modern species to the evolution from more primitive species. In particular, an evolutionist is someone who advocates common descent and the modern synthesis.

Okay, so we can start calling astronomers "gravityists" then.

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Some scientists do not accept the theory of common descent as the explanation for man's biological existence.

The number for all US scientists and engineers who rejected evolution was about 5%. When you narrow this down to only the scientists that study relevant fields like biology, it's less than 0.15% It's much lower when you figure in the rest of the world. "Some scientists" probably do not accept electrons as the stuff that makes computers go, either.

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2) Eye witness accounts also need to be corroborated, especially when they make fantastical reading.

I didn't say anything about eye witnesses, or even humans. My emphasis is on the intelligent, orderly and controlled recordings of events, versus inference based on indirect evidence.

Okay, so unless you specifically want to bring up some kind of other being specifically I'm just going to assume you're still talking about humans. Because those are the only known living things that record observations in a controlled and intelligent manor.

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The old saying is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

You are changing the subject.

No I'm not. If you want to put forth some kind of claim about the reliability of records, we need to consider the reliability of the records. If you don't like that, please exit the conversation now and save us all some trouble.

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Besides which, people are prone to false memories and exaggerated accounts.

Irrelevant and not useful to your position even if it were relevant. It's people who are making the observations for the theory of evolution, too. It's people in any case, unless you think scientists are infallible machines.

Scientific observations are replicable. When Michelson and Morley reported that light didn't behave as though being transmitted through a special medium, they made sure that other people could repeat their observations. When Richard Lenski started up his long-term E. coli experiment, he made sure that everybody with the skills to do so could go through his results and look at his samples and confirm whether or not he was giving a reliable account of the observations. And if you need to double-check the measurements of ancient Homo remains to see if anybody is exaggerating their dimensions to make them seem somehow more intermediary between modern humans an ancestral apes, you can do it. Scientists aren't infallible machines, and they are not treated as such. That's why science as a practice is inherently skeptical, self-critical, peer-reviewed, and conducted according to principles of openness and repeatability. Nobody's word is law, but the results and the process matter.

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We take all the talk of troop strength from surviving records of battles in the ancient world with a healthy dose of skepticism, for example.

Most of our knowledge of the ancient world ultimately hinge on single accounts that are handed down to us after multiple repetitions. For example, the Battle of Thermopylae changed the course of Western Civilization, but everything we know about it comes to use indirectly from just one man's account. Everything we know about Socrates comes to us indirectly from just a few people. In both of those cases, we don't have the original accounts even of the indirect sources; we rely on copies made centuries after the event. How much more do you think we would know if we had contemporary, orderly and intelligent records? Nye and others who argue like him would leave you to believe that this information is not lost, that we could reconstruct the past adequately just from the fragments that have survived until today.

We actually can do a lot to reconstruct the past. More records would always be helpful and welcome, and they would narrow down the error bars and clear up some of the lingering issues. Again, this is a lot like the forensic science that can determine whether or not a person should be robbed of their freedom.

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The Bible is the best source of knowledge we have of the ancient world. It was written by people who were much closer to the events portrayed, and we have copies of those accounts that are within the time of a human lifetime. That is rarely true of anything else we know of the ancient world.

It's definitely a remarkable collection of accounts and stories, but one that should be taken with a grain of salt. This is true even more clearly to the people that actually study the Bible and other ancient sources. To the majority of them, it doesn't seem as though the Bible is a totally reliable series of first-hand accounts. It's definitely not free from errors or internal inconsistencies. And in places where the records survived because of oral tradition before being written down, the accounts given are clearly at odds with just about everything else available. Somehow the Sumerians and Egyptians failed to notice a global, omnicidal flood occurring during their heydays. You'd think such an event would merit at least a mention in their written records from the time, right? But nope. Apparently Noah's flood came and went without so much as interrupting the marketplaces in those civilizations. It also doesn't match any of the un-written records. We have nothing that fits the pattern expected of a global flood in terms of stratigraphy, geography, distribution of all living things (including humans), etc. There is literally nothing to make you think that a flood happened according to the "account" given in Genesis except the "account" given in Genesis. And this is a problem, because something of that scale must have left enormous amounts of evidence if it actually happened at all. There can be no ambiguity about the signs it would have made. They would be instantly recognizable and distinct. That's just for the Flood. There are other, less glaring but still impossible problems in other areas of the Bible that either don't accord with themselves, don't accord with other records and evidence, or both. All signs point to the Bible being a product of human origination.

... And this is exactly what happens when you try to argue scientia or sapientia against fundamentalism. This thread, right here: this common cry of curs, whose breath I hate, whose loves I prize as the dead carcasses of unburied men that do corrupt my air. (Quick, Google...)

Simple definition of terms:

What is it to win an argument?

To be right is not enough; in fact, it's almost irrelevant. An air of 'righteousness' is more compelling than the perfume of truth, and most people no more recognise wisdom than they would the face of divinity itself.

The only way to win an argument is for the nominal opponent or the audience to admit A) that you are right, B) that they *were* wrong, or ideally C) both.

A debate isn't necessarily about deciding at the end that one side is right and one side is wrong. It's enough that two conflicting viewpoints exchange ideas, explore the merits and flaws of a position, and perhaps come away knowing more about the world than they did at the start of the debate. The most depressing thing about this debate isn't that there were no clear 'winners' or 'losers' - it's that it was ultimately completely useless because Ham was unwilling to consider any information other than his own. The Bible is 100% true and infallible, and the rest of his position follows from there. It's unfair for the debate to demand that Nye examine the weaknesses of his position when Ham dismisses any supposed weaknesses out of hand.

A lot of people ask why Nye would agree to the debate and what he has to gain. A better question might be why Ham would agree to the debate. He has nothing to gain from a debate, because in his mind, he's already won it.

Personally I'm more curious about his apparent claim that some of the things he experiences are from the future.

I knew someone would say that! That's why I pointed out that in quantum mechanics, some of the test results imply that the particles somehow are responding to events that will happen in the future.

No test results in quantum mechanics imply that at all. The ones you think do you're misunderstanding. Which is understandable, because QM is hard to understand. But so far causality is fine.

Edit: Yep, exactly what I was thinking of. If you ignore the pop-sci headlines and go to primary sources you'll see they are not claiming retro-causality. In fact explicitly disclaiming it. Everything that happens in those experiments can be undrestood through traditional forward-propagation of correlations between wave functions.

It's possible that I misunderstand the science (I haven't done much with QM), but the specific experiment that I had in mind is that of particles sent down a path. Ahead of them is a branch in their path. Their characteristics change depending on whether an observer ahead of them sends them down one path or the other in the future.

Yeah or the future selection was affected by previous state it necessarily had to remain consistent with. It's a little similar to how a positron going forward in time is indistinguishable from an electron going backward in time. But when the supposed retro-causilty is actually indistinguishable from normal forward causilty, then it's not actually anything new or threatening to existing notions of reality. It's an old problem, that predates QM: All the known laws of mechanics are time-reversible, so why do we perceive time going in one direction? Entropy is the best answer we've come up with so far, and it works fairly well, though it raises the question of why the universe was in a low-entropy state in the past.

In any case, these experiments don't show (and whenever I've gone to the primary literature, haven't claimed to show) any kind of meaningfully different retro-causality.

[SNIP]The Bible is the best source of knowledge we have of the ancient world. It was written by people who were much closer to the events portrayed, and we have copies of those accounts that are within the time of a human lifetime. That is rarely true of anything else we know of the ancient world.

Scholars place the written version of The Iliad at 760-710 BC. Are we then to assume that because it's old, everything in it is true?

Some scientists do not accept the theory of common descent as the explanation for man's biological existence.

The number for all US scientists and engineers who rejected evolution was about 5%. When you narrow this down to only the scientists that study relevant fields like biology, it's less than 0.15% It's much lower when you figure in the rest of the world.

My point is that it is incorrect to include all scientists under a single label if that label does not describe all of them.

2) Eye witness accounts also need to be corroborated, especially when they make fantastical reading.

I didn't say anything about eye witnesses, or even humans. My emphasis is on the intelligent, orderly and controlled recordings of events, versus inference based on indirect evidence.

Okay, so unless you specifically want to bring up some kind of other being specifically I'm just going to assume you're still talking about humans. Because those are the only known living things that record observations in a controlled and intelligent manor.

Why do we have to assume that the observer is any particular thing beyond being an observer? Your reference to eye witness accounts makes me wonder what else you are assuming, but not stating, about these observers.

The old saying is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

You are changing the subject.

No I'm not. If you want to put forth some kind of claim about the reliability of records, we need to consider the reliability of the records. If you don't like that, please exit the conversation now and save us all some trouble.

Your reply would make logical sense if I were critiquing extraordinary claims at that point, but I wasn't. I was critiquing the pedestrian quality of data obtained during and after events take place.

Besides which, people are prone to false memories and exaggerated accounts.

Irrelevant and not useful to your position even if it were relevant. It's people who are making the observations for the theory of evolution, too. It's people in any case, unless you think scientists are infallible machines.

Scientific observations are replicable. When Michelson and Morley reported that light didn't behave as though being transmitted through a special medium, they made sure that other people could repeat their observations. When Richard Lenski started up his long-term E. coli experiment, he made sure that everybody with the skills to do so could go through his results and look at his samples and confirm whether or not he was giving a reliable account of the observations. And if you need to double-check the measurements of ancient Homo remains to see if anybody is exaggerating their dimensions to make them seem somehow more intermediary between modern humans an ancestral apes, you can do it.

See, this is the shell game that evolutionists love to play. Michelson and Morley observed the interaction of light *as it took place*. Lenski observed E. coli that were present in front of him. The dimensions of fossil remains are present at the time of observation. What is not present are the events that took place when that fossil was a living creature. You cannot observe those events; you can only infer them indirectly, if at all. Evolutionists love to confuse the difference between inference and observation.

Scientists aren't infallible machines, and they are not treated as such. That's why science as a practice is inherently skeptical, self-critical, peer-reviewed, and conducted according to principles of openness and repeatability. Nobody's word is law, but the results and the process matter.

Not all events are repeatable. History is a one-time event. The general principles may continue, but the actual event happens only one time in all eternity. You cannot step twice in the same river; it's always a little different. You cannot repeat the supposed evolution of hominids; that happened one time, and if the process were repeated, the end result would be different each time it was repeated. That's one point about evolution not having a direction. So, you can measure and remeasure a thigh bone as often as you like, but you are never going to see that particular bone regrow from an embryo into an adult. You have to infer what happened, and inference is not observation.

We take all the talk of troop strength from surviving records of battles in the ancient world with a healthy dose of skepticism, for example.

Most of our knowledge of the ancient world ultimately hinge on single accounts that are handed down to us after multiple repetitions. For example, the Battle of Thermopylae changed the course of Western Civilization, but everything we know about it comes to use indirectly from just one man's account. Everything we know about Socrates comes to us indirectly from just a few people. In both of those cases, we don't have the original accounts even of the indirect sources; we rely on copies made centuries after the event. How much more do you think we would know if we had contemporary, orderly and intelligent records? Nye and others who argue like him would leave you to believe that this information is not lost, that we could reconstruct the past adequately just from the fragments that have survived until today.

We actually can do a lot to reconstruct the past. More records would always be helpful and welcome, and they would narrow down the error bars and clear up some of the lingering issues. Again, this is a lot like the forensic science that can determine whether or not a person should be robbed of their freedom.

Have you ever heard of the Freedom Project? Hundreds of people have been falsely imprisoned, often on the strength of forensics. The assumption that we can recreate the past in sufficient detail that we usually understand what happens, no matter how much time has passed, is wrong. The assumption that our inferences about the past are as good as actually observing events as they take place is wrong. Bill Nye is wrong!

The Bible is the best source of knowledge we have of the ancient world. It was written by people who were much closer to the events portrayed, and we have copies of those accounts that are within the time of a human lifetime. That is rarely true of anything else we know of the ancient world.

It's definitely a remarkable collection of accounts and stories, but one that should be taken with a grain of salt. This is true even more clearly to the people that actually study the Bible and other ancient sources. To the majority of them, it doesn't seem as though the Bible is a totally reliable series of first-hand accounts. It's definitely not free from errors or internal inconsistencies. And in places where the records survived because of oral tradition before being written down, the accounts given are clearly at odds with just about everything else available. Somehow the Sumerians and Egyptians failed to notice a global, omnicidal flood occurring during their heydays. You'd think such an event would merit at least a mention in their written records from the time, right? But nope. Apparently Noah's flood came and went without so much as interrupting the marketplaces in those civilizations. It also doesn't match any of the un-written records. We have nothing that fits the pattern expected of a global flood in terms of stratigraphy, geography, distribution of all living things (including humans), etc. There is literally nothing to make you think that a flood happened according to the "account" given in Genesis except the "account" given in Genesis. And this is a problem, because something of that scale must have left enormous amounts of evidence if it actually happened at all. There can be no ambiguity about the signs it would have made. They would be instantly recognizable and distinct. That's just for the Flood. There are other, less glaring but still impossible problems in other areas of the Bible that either don't accord with themselves, don't accord with other records and evidence, or both. All signs point to the Bible being a product of human origination.

Again, all we can do about the past is infer what happened. We cannot recreate it. No number of fossils or archeological artifacts is ever going to substitute for a reliable recorder actually being present when the events took place. So, even though I might not be able to explain the inconsistencies in our understanding of Noah's Flood, all we have to go on are the records we have of those events. You either accept history, or you don't. You cannot prove it wrong or right.

[SNIP]The Bible is the best source of knowledge we have of the ancient world. It was written by people who were much closer to the events portrayed, and we have copies of those accounts that are within the time of a human lifetime. That is rarely true of anything else we know of the ancient world.

Scholars place the written version of The Iliad at 760-710 BC. Are we then to assume that because it's old, everything in it is true?

Being old isn't the point I was making. Being written close to the time that the events actually took place is. The Illiad wasn't written until many centuries after the events it relates, if those events ever took place at all.

Some scientists do not accept the theory of common descent as the explanation for man's biological existence.

The number for all US scientists and engineers who rejected evolution was about 5%. When you narrow this down to only the scientists that study relevant fields like biology, it's less than 0.15% It's much lower when you figure in the rest of the world.

My point is that it is incorrect to include all scientists under a single label if that label does not describe all of them.

2) Eye witness accounts also need to be corroborated, especially when they make fantastical reading.

I didn't say anything about eye witnesses, or even humans. My emphasis is on the intelligent, orderly and controlled recordings of events, versus inference based on indirect evidence.

Okay, so unless you specifically want to bring up some kind of other being specifically I'm just going to assume you're still talking about humans. Because those are the only known living things that record observations in a controlled and intelligent manor.

Why do we have to assume that the observer is any particular thing beyond being an observer? Your reference to eye witness accounts makes me wonder what else you are assuming, but not stating, about these observers.

The old saying is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

You are changing the subject.

No I'm not. If you want to put forth some kind of claim about the reliability of records, we need to consider the reliability of the records. If you don't like that, please exit the conversation now and save us all some trouble.

Your reply would make logical sense if I were critiquing extraordinary claims at that point, but I wasn't. I was critiquing the pedestrian quality of data obtained during and after events take place.

Besides which, people are prone to false memories and exaggerated accounts.

Irrelevant and not useful to your position even if it were relevant. It's people who are making the observations for the theory of evolution, too. It's people in any case, unless you think scientists are infallible machines.

Scientific observations are replicable. When Michelson and Morley reported that light didn't behave as though being transmitted through a special medium, they made sure that other people could repeat their observations. When Richard Lenski started up his long-term E. coli experiment, he made sure that everybody with the skills to do so could go through his results and look at his samples and confirm whether or not he was giving a reliable account of the observations. And if you need to double-check the measurements of ancient Homo remains to see if anybody is exaggerating their dimensions to make them seem somehow more intermediary between modern humans an ancestral apes, you can do it.

See, this is the shell game that evolutionists love to play. Michelson and Morley observed the interaction of light *as it took place*. Lenski observed E. coli that were present in front of him. The dimensions of fossil remains are present at the time of observation. What is not present are the events that took place when that fossil was a living creature. You cannot observe those events; you can only infer them indirectly, if at all. Evolutionists love to confuse the difference between inference and observation.

Scientists aren't infallible machines, and they are not treated as such. That's why science as a practice is inherently skeptical, self-critical, peer-reviewed, and conducted according to principles of openness and repeatability. Nobody's word is law, but the results and the process matter.

Not all events are repeatable. History is a one-time event. The general principles may continue, but the actual event happens only one time in all eternity. You cannot step twice in the same river; it's always a little different. You cannot repeat the supposed evolution of hominids; that happened one time, and if the process were repeated, the end result would be different each time it was repeated. That's one point about evolution not having a direction. So, you can measure and remeasure a thigh bone as often as you like, but you are never going to see that particular bone regrow from an embryo into an adult. You have to infer what happened, and inference is not observation.

We take all the talk of troop strength from surviving records of battles in the ancient world with a healthy dose of skepticism, for example.

Most of our knowledge of the ancient world ultimately hinge on single accounts that are handed down to us after multiple repetitions. For example, the Battle of Thermopylae changed the course of Western Civilization, but everything we know about it comes to use indirectly from just one man's account. Everything we know about Socrates comes to us indirectly from just a few people. In both of those cases, we don't have the original accounts even of the indirect sources; we rely on copies made centuries after the event. How much more do you think we would know if we had contemporary, orderly and intelligent records? Nye and others who argue like him would leave you to believe that this information is not lost, that we could reconstruct the past adequately just from the fragments that have survived until today.

We actually can do a lot to reconstruct the past. More records would always be helpful and welcome, and they would narrow down the error bars and clear up some of the lingering issues. Again, this is a lot like the forensic science that can determine whether or not a person should be robbed of their freedom.

Have you ever heard of the Freedom Project? Hundreds of people have been falsely imprisoned, often on the strength of forensics. The assumption that we can recreate the past in sufficient detail that we usually understand what happens, no matter how much time has passed, is wrong. The assumption that our inferences about the past are as good as actually observing events as they take place is wrong. Bill Nye is wrong!

The Bible is the best source of knowledge we have of the ancient world. It was written by people who were much closer to the events portrayed, and we have copies of those accounts that are within the time of a human lifetime. That is rarely true of anything else we know of the ancient world.

It's definitely a remarkable collection of accounts and stories, but one that should be taken with a grain of salt. This is true even more clearly to the people that actually study the Bible and other ancient sources. To the majority of them, it doesn't seem as though the Bible is a totally reliable series of first-hand accounts. It's definitely not free from errors or internal inconsistencies. And in places where the records survived because of oral tradition before being written down, the accounts given are clearly at odds with just about everything else available. Somehow the Sumerians and Egyptians failed to notice a global, omnicidal flood occurring during their heydays. You'd think such an event would merit at least a mention in their written records from the time, right? But nope. Apparently Noah's flood came and went without so much as interrupting the marketplaces in those civilizations. It also doesn't match any of the un-written records. We have nothing that fits the pattern expected of a global flood in terms of stratigraphy, geography, distribution of all living things (including humans), etc. There is literally nothing to make you think that a flood happened according to the "account" given in Genesis except the "account" given in Genesis. And this is a problem, because something of that scale must have left enormous amounts of evidence if it actually happened at all. There can be no ambiguity about the signs it would have made. They would be instantly recognizable and distinct. That's just for the Flood. There are other, less glaring but still impossible problems in other areas of the Bible that either don't accord with themselves, don't accord with other records and evidence, or both. All signs point to the Bible being a product of human origination.

Again, all we can do about the past is infer what happened. We cannot recreate it. No number of fossils or archeological artifacts is ever going to substitute for a reliable recorder actually being present when the events took place. So, even though I might not be able to explain the inconsistencies in our understanding of Noah's Flood, all we have to go on are the records we have of those events. You either accept history, or you don't. You cannot prove it wrong or right.

Hey Opcode, this is page 21 of this thread if you haven't noticed, which means that those of us pro-science types who are still around have become battle-weary after beating down several creationist "thinkers" (including one particularly imaginative and intractable specimen whose never-say-die tactics generated at least four full pages of dynamic, innovative discussion.

Anyway, my point is, we may have the thousand-yard-stare at this point, but we're still game to fight. And the weak tea you're serving is nothing compared to what we've already defeated. Here it is again: the same proscriptive tone; the same miserably stupid arguments; the same ridiculous misunderstandings of basic science; the same guileless arrogance. But it won't make any difference. Those of us who understand and believe in the Enlightenment and all that's good and true in human innovation and intellectual achievement will prevail.

Hey Opcode, this is page 21 of this thread if you haven't noticed, which means that those of us pro-science types who are still around have become battle-weary after beating down several creationist "thinkers" (including one particularly imaginative and intractable specimen whose never-say-die tactics generated at least four full pages of dynamic, innovative discussion.

Ah, the arrogance of the evolutionists! You assume that because I critique your arguments that I'm not "pro-science."

Anyway, my point is, we may have the thousand-yard-stare at this point, but we're still game to fight. And the weak tea you're serving is nothing compared to what we've already defeated. Here it is again: the same proscriptive tone; the same miserably stupid arguments; the same ridiculous misunderstandings of basic science; the same guileless arrogance. But it won't make any difference. Those of us who understand and believe in the Enlightenment and all that's good and true in human innovation and intellectual achievement will prevail.

This isn't my first rodeo. I've been arguing with evolutionists online for 15 years.

Some scientists do not accept the theory of common descent as the explanation for man's biological existence.

The number for all US scientists and engineers who rejected evolution was about 5%. When you narrow this down to only the scientists that study relevant fields like biology, it's less than 0.15% It's much lower when you figure in the rest of the world.

My point is that it is incorrect to include all scientists under a single label if that label does not describe all of them.

Common troll tactic: Implying that since some scientists disagree on something, the topic is not settled. Here's the thing: if you search hard enough you can ALWAYS find someone to disagree with a widely accepted position. If 99.9% of scientists agree on an issue, you'd assume that issue is settled, right? And yet, that 0.1% of dissenters is enough that in a large city you'd find several people to disagree with it. This isn't to say that 99.9% of scientists agree on evolution, because they don't. This is saying that expecting 100% unanimity on anything is not a realistic requirement.

2) Eye witness accounts also need to be corroborated, especially when they make fantastical reading.

I didn't say anything about eye witnesses, or even humans. My emphasis is on the intelligent, orderly and controlled recordings of events, versus inference based on indirect evidence.

Okay, so unless you specifically want to bring up some kind of other being specifically I'm just going to assume you're still talking about humans. Because those are the only known living things that record observations in a controlled and intelligent manor.

Why do we have to assume that the observer is any particular thing beyond being an observer? Your reference to eye witness accounts makes me wonder what else you are assuming, but not stating, about these observers.

The old saying is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

You are changing the subject.

No I'm not. If you want to put forth some kind of claim about the reliability of records, we need to consider the reliability of the records. If you don't like that, please exit the conversation now and save us all some trouble.

Your reply would make logical sense if I were critiquing extraordinary claims at that point, but I wasn't. I was critiquing the pedestrian quality of data obtained during and after events take place.

No. It doesn't matter how extraordinary or not the claims are, you also consider the reliability of the person making the claims. Even in mundane matters involving police, journalists, etc. collecting eyewitness accounts, they don't just blinding take the witness's word for it. They compare it against available evidence, compare it with other accounts to see if they match, and see if there's anything in the witness's background that suggests he/she is prone to lying or has something to gain from it.

Besides which, people are prone to false memories and exaggerated accounts.

Irrelevant and not useful to your position even if it were relevant. It's people who are making the observations for the theory of evolution, too. It's people in any case, unless you think scientists are infallible machines.

Scientific observations are replicable. When Michelson and Morley reported that light didn't behave as though being transmitted through a special medium, they made sure that other people could repeat their observations. When Richard Lenski started up his long-term E. coli experiment, he made sure that everybody with the skills to do so could go through his results and look at his samples and confirm whether or not he was giving a reliable account of the observations. And if you need to double-check the measurements of ancient Homo remains to see if anybody is exaggerating their dimensions to make them seem somehow more intermediary between modern humans an ancestral apes, you can do it.

See, this is the shell game that evolutionists love to play. Michelson and Morley observed the interaction of light *as it took place*. Lenski observed E. coli that were present in front of him. The dimensions of fossil remains are present at the time of observation. What is not present are the events that took place when that fossil was a living creature. You cannot observe those events; you can only infer them indirectly, if at all. Evolutionists love to confuse the difference between inference and observation.

Scientists largely don't make any distinction between the two. The number of useful things that can be determined from direct observation only is vanishingly small. Most modern science relies on inference - an analytical technique provides some numbers or images, and based on those and the experiment's design, assumptions are made. If the science is sound, the assumptions tend to be pretty good. That goes for most medical tests, too. Do you trust what your doctor says when he decides things based on X-rays, CAT scans, MRIs, or blood tests? Because that's all based on inference. PS, if you're going to continue this line of reasoning, please read this first, so you can hopefully abandon it and save us all a lot of trouble.

Scientists aren't infallible machines, and they are not treated as such. That's why science as a practice is inherently skeptical, self-critical, peer-reviewed, and conducted according to principles of openness and repeatability. Nobody's word is law, but the results and the process matter.

Not all events are repeatable. History is a one-time event. The general principles may continue, but the actual event happens only one time in all eternity. You cannot step twice in the same river; it's always a little different. You cannot repeat the supposed evolution of hominids; that happened one time, and if the process were repeated, the end result would be different each time it was repeated. That's one point about evolution not having a direction. So, you can measure and remeasure a thigh bone as often as you like, but you are never going to see that particular bone regrow from an embryo into an adult. You have to infer what happened, and inference is not observation.

We take all the talk of troop strength from surviving records of battles in the ancient world with a healthy dose of skepticism, for example.

Most of our knowledge of the ancient world ultimately hinge on single accounts that are handed down to us after multiple repetitions. For example, the Battle of Thermopylae changed the course of Western Civilization, but everything we know about it comes to use indirectly from just one man's account. Everything we know about Socrates comes to us indirectly from just a few people. In both of those cases, we don't have the original accounts even of the indirect sources; we rely on copies made centuries after the event. How much more do you think we would know if we had contemporary, orderly and intelligent records? Nye and others who argue like him would leave you to believe that this information is not lost, that we could reconstruct the past adequately just from the fragments that have survived until today.

We actually can do a lot to reconstruct the past. More records would always be helpful and welcome, and they would narrow down the error bars and clear up some of the lingering issues. Again, this is a lot like the forensic science that can determine whether or not a person should be robbed of their freedom.

Have you ever heard of the Freedom Project? Hundreds of people have been falsely imprisoned, often on the strength of forensics. The assumption that we can recreate the past in sufficient detail that we usually understand what happens, no matter how much time has passed, is wrong. The assumption that our inferences about the past are as good as actually observing events as they take place is wrong. Bill Nye is wrong!

Going back to the notion of the reliability of eyewitness accounts -First of all, a lot of Freedom Project cases involve situations where the forensics was improperly conducted or handled, or the prosecution/police mishandled evidence. And second, you want to imply that forensics isn't perfect but that eyewitness accounts are somehow absolutely perfect in their reliability and accuracy? Because there are LOADS of stories out there of bad eyewitness testimony, witnesses later recanting their statements, etc. that have put potentially innocent people away.

The Bible is the best source of knowledge we have of the ancient world. It was written by people who were much closer to the events portrayed, and we have copies of those accounts that are within the time of a human lifetime. That is rarely true of anything else we know of the ancient world.

It's definitely a remarkable collection of accounts and stories, but one that should be taken with a grain of salt. This is true even more clearly to the people that actually study the Bible and other ancient sources. To the majority of them, it doesn't seem as though the Bible is a totally reliable series of first-hand accounts. It's definitely not free from errors or internal inconsistencies. And in places where the records survived because of oral tradition before being written down, the accounts given are clearly at odds with just about everything else available. Somehow the Sumerians and Egyptians failed to notice a global, omnicidal flood occurring during their heydays. You'd think such an event would merit at least a mention in their written records from the time, right? But nope. Apparently Noah's flood came and went without so much as interrupting the marketplaces in those civilizations. It also doesn't match any of the un-written records. We have nothing that fits the pattern expected of a global flood in terms of stratigraphy, geography, distribution of all living things (including humans), etc. There is literally nothing to make you think that a flood happened according to the "account" given in Genesis except the "account" given in Genesis. And this is a problem, because something of that scale must have left enormous amounts of evidence if it actually happened at all. There can be no ambiguity about the signs it would have made. They would be instantly recognizable and distinct. That's just for the Flood. There are other, less glaring but still impossible problems in other areas of the Bible that either don't accord with themselves, don't accord with other records and evidence, or both. All signs point to the Bible being a product of human origination.

Again, all we can do about the past is infer what happened. We cannot recreate it. No number of fossils or archeological artifacts is ever going to substitute for a reliable recorder actually being present when the events took place. So, even though I might not be able to explain the inconsistencies in our understanding of Noah's Flood, all we have to go on are the records we have of those events. You either accept history, or you don't. You cannot prove it wrong or right.

That's more or less exactly the point Wheels made - we use the records of historical events to piece together what happened. But there is more than one historical record, and the many records often don't agree with each other. Wheels points out that the Biblical account of the flood conflicts with other accounts of that time period that somehow don't mention a massive, month-long inundation. There are ways reconciling the two accounts and getting a better idea of what happened, but "the Bible must definitely be right because GOD" is not an explanation that holds up to any sort of scientific scrutiny.

No number of fossils or archeological artifacts is ever going to substitute for a reliable recorder actually being present when the events took place. So, even though I might not be able to explain the inconsistencies in our understanding of Noah's Flood, all we have to go on are the records we have of those events.

That would be circular reasoning, via the assumption that "a reliable recorder was actually present".

The Catholic Church and even Pat Robertson, a well-known Evangelist, have all disclaimed Ham's cockeyed concept of the bible as literal truth.

The only thing that will get the attention of these unfortunate close-minded people is when a group of fellow Christian leaders stand up together and make an effort to end this crazyness once and for all.

All Hail the Mighty FSM.

No it won't, they'll just flock to the next demagogue who feeds their fears and hates, and finds a way to blow sunshine up their asses while picking their pockets.

This just shows us that theism/religion is about one thing: controlling people; and the way they do it is to convince them of some ridiculousness and then fleece them of every spare dime they can squeeze out of them.

Being old isn't the point I was making. Being written close to the time that the events actually took place is. The Illiad wasn't written until many centuries after the events it relates, if those events ever took place at all.

Now apply that to the alleged global flood and our oldest written extant copy of Genesis.

[SNIP]The Bible is the best source of knowledge we have of the ancient world. It was written by people who were much closer to the events portrayed, and we have copies of those accounts that are within the time of a human lifetime. That is rarely true of anything else we know of the ancient world.

Scholars place the written version of The Iliad at 760-710 BC. Are we then to assume that because it's old, everything in it is true?

Being old isn't the point I was making. Being written close to the time that the events actually took place is. The Illiad wasn't written until many centuries after the events it relates, if those events ever took place at all.

First, "Illiad" has only one "L". Second, the real point is that a story is nothing more than that: a story. Decent ones are illustrative of the human condition regardless of their veracity regarding real events.

The film, "2001: A Space Odyssey" was created in 1969 (based on a story written in 1951). By your reasoning, that should make it a more realistic portrayal of life in the oughts than whatever may be written about that period in 2055 since it's "close[r] to the time." You cannot reasonably assert that those events which the Bible portrays are any more real than those portrayed in Iliad. For that matter, no rational human would assert that James Bond actually existed or that he ever drove a gondola out of the Venice canals and onto the streets.

"Showboat" was a 1927 musical about a Mississippi river-boat that performed between 1887 and 1927. Should we therefore extrapolate that a real river-boat captain named Andy Hawks misled a crowd about a fist-fight in Natchez, Mississippi in ANY year without corroborating evidence?

You must (reasonably) abandon the argument that anything written close to the events it purports to portray is necessarily more accurate.

Opcode: To use your line of reasoning, if police find a corpse who has been shot in the back of the head twelve times with a revolver, but there is any eye witness (the owner of the gun, who was arguing with the dead man at the time) who says that it was a suicide in which someone shot themselves six times in the back of the head, reloaded, then shot themselves six more times, do you take the witness's word for it? I mean, he's a reliable observer who recorded the events as they happened, and you either accept history or you don't, right?

Engaging zealotry of this sort is the stupidest thing one can do. Period. Not ifs, ands or buts. The Scopes trial served a definite purpose to undermine a ridiculous law. By contrast there was no purpose for this debate, all Nye did was give the zealots a national platform. It was a pure act of vanity on his part. And that's monumentally dumb.

As a child I tried very hard to believe in gods and miracles. After years of trying, I realised that religious lore is no more believable than the tooth fairy. There is simply nothing to prove religious lore does not originate from people just like the stories of all those other religions (or the tooth fairy).

I don't mind if Buddhists and Hindus and Muslims and Christians and Taoists and Hellenists want to believe in these stories and that these stories give them comfort and pleasure. It is concerning when they want to impose teachings about reincarnation on children at school and call it science. Or was it creationism we were talking about here?

Some of those religious stories make for great reading. The Mahabharata for example is a great story from some 3,000 years ago. There are some good stories in the Bible too, and it's easy to forgot that people once believed in Native American, Greek, Norse, and Egyptian stories every bit as much as the followers of today's religions.

There is a big difference between stories written by people hundreds or thousands of years ago, and understanding of the world based on what we can observe around us. Bill Nye's debate aimed to inform people about the difference between science and stories. In that I think it was a success, and as long as debate and argument is used to inform people about the difference between science and stories I think it serves a valuable purpose.

I have really enjoyed reading the discussion here, I have learnt a lot, and I would like to thank everyone who has taken the time to write down their thoughts. Our world and its history over billions or years is truly amazing.

Hey Opcode, this is page 21 of this thread if you haven't noticed, which means that those of us pro-science types who are still around have become battle-weary after beating down several creationist "thinkers" (including one particularly imaginative and intractable specimen whose never-say-die tactics generated at least four full pages of dynamic, innovative discussion.

My point is that it is incorrect to include all scientists under a single label if that label does not describe all of them.

It includes so many of them that the number who dissent is statistically insignificant, especially the scientists who do any work that brushes up against evolution even in passing. The number of anti-evolutionists who are biologists versus biologists as a whole is less than a rounding error. To a good approximation, it's all of them. We essentially come to the point that it's no longer useful to say that the subject has any scientific controversy to it whatsoever. This also fits with the evidence that anti-evolutionism is not science because it does not adhere to the scientific method. The "scientists" who reject evolution are either specialists in completely irrelevant fields, or if not then their reasons for rejecting evolution aren't sufficiently scientific to qualify as science in the first place, so when they do so they aren't acting as scientists.

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Why do we have to assume that the observer is any particular thing beyond being an observer?

Because that's how you described it:

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compare how the quality of information differs when an intelligent observer is present to make orderly and controlled recordings of the event, verses the quality of information derived exclusively by forensic reconstruction.

I'm not going to play tag with your arguments. Be consistent instead of obtuse, or feel free to leave.

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Your reply would make logical sense if I were critiquing extraordinary claims at that point, but I wasn't. I was critiquing the pedestrian quality of data obtained during and after events take place.

You are specifically citing the Bible, which is full of literally fantastical events, as a reliable source of recorded evidence in opposition to what "evolutionist" scientists conclude from evidence. Again, don't be a dissembler. After twenty pages of bullshit I have had more than my fill.

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See, this is the shell game that evolutionists love to play. Michelson and Morley observed the interaction of light *as it took place*. Lenski observed E. coli that were present in front of him. The dimensions of fossil remains are present at the time of observation. What is not present are the events that took place when that fossil was a living creature. You cannot observe those events; you can only infer them indirectly, if at all. Evolutionists love to confuse the difference between inference and observation.

All observations are inferences. There is no meaningful difference between studying and categorizing the fossilized remains of various hominids and studying them in vivo that would make our conclusions about their relation to us and our relationship with other apes less certain. This is especially true when we can compare the genomes of living and dead specimens to build up the genetic trees of relationship and heredity.

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Not all events are repeatable. History is a one-time event. The general principles may continue, but the actual event happens only one time in all eternity.

The general principles are enough to rule out so many potential alternatives that it actually does count as an observation. Especially when there is a startling lack of evidence for any supposed alternatives, evidence we would expect to find if those alternatives were true. That's the entire point of testing ideas against each other via the evidence.

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We actually can do a lot to reconstruct the past. More records would always be helpful and welcome, and they would narrow down the error bars and clear up some of the lingering issues. Again, this is a lot like the forensic science that can determine whether or not a person should be robbed of their freedom.

Have you ever heard of the Freedom Project? Hundreds of people have been falsely imprisoned, often on the strength of forensics. The assumption that we can recreate the past in sufficient detail that we usually understand what happens, no matter how much time has passed, is wrong.

All of those people are acquitted because of forensics. And often enough it is in contradiction to the testimony of intelligent observers whose sworn statements helped convict those people.

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Again, all we can do about the past is infer what happened. We cannot recreate it. No number of fossils or archeological artifacts is ever going to substitute for a reliable recorder actually being present when the events took place. So, even though I might not be able to explain the inconsistencies in our understanding of Noah's Flood, all we have to go on are the records we have of those events. You either accept history, or you don't. You cannot prove it wrong or right.

We have literally no reason to accept that "history" as true, in fact we have utterly damning reasons to doubt them. Say what you will about inferences and reconstructions of the past, but if you're picking a fight with thermodynamics, you're going to lose. This is an unambiguous result. This is the Michelson-Morley experiment of Flood geology; we are observing a present that cannot have happened if there was a Noahide Deluge, just as they observed a present that would be impossible if luminiferous ether existed. Since the present we observe did happen, it conclusively rules out the possibility of a Genesis Flood as described in the Bible. How far are you willing to take the idea of the Bible as a reliable account of events?

When push comes to shove, there is exactly as much physical evidence to support the Genesis flood as there is to support the Wizarding Wars. There is actually less evidence against the latter because the implications for a global flood are far further reaching in scope and should be instantly obvious all over the world, unlike the relative ease with which a wizard fight could be missed by casual observers. Harry Potter turns out to be less problematic to fit into the evidence and written records we have than Genesis does. How do you think it makes sense to support Genesis as an historical account when literally every major feature of things like the Flood is impossible to reconcile with everything else around us?

Hey Opcode, this is page 21 of this thread if you haven't noticed, which means that those of us pro-science types who are still around have become battle-weary after beating down several creationist "thinkers" (including one particularly imaginative and intractable specimen whose never-say-die tactics generated at least four full pages of dynamic, innovative discussion.

Ah, the arrogance of the evolutionists! You assume that because I critique your arguments that I'm not "pro-science."

Anyway, my point is, we may have the thousand-yard-stare at this point, but we're still game to fight. And the weak tea you're serving is nothing compared to what we've already defeated. Here it is again: the same proscriptive tone; the same miserably stupid arguments; the same ridiculous misunderstandings of basic science; the same guileless arrogance. But it won't make any difference. Those of us who understand and believe in the Enlightenment and all that's good and true in human innovation and intellectual achievement will prevail.

This isn't my first rodeo. I've been arguing with evolutionists online for 15 years.

Have you ever heard of the Freedom Project? Hundreds of people have been falsely imprisoned, often on the strength of forensics. The assumption that we can recreate the past in sufficient detail that we usually understand what happens, no matter how much time has passed, is wrong.

All of those people are acquitted because of forensics. And often enough it is in contradiction to the testimony of intelligent observers whose sworn statements helped convict those people.

Not quite true, my friend Curtis McCarty was freed by the Innocence Project (which, by the way, is the name Opcode was looking for) after they proved that the state of Oklahoma used fake forensic evidence which had been forged by forensic analyst Joyce Gilchrist, who also forged evidence in at least two other cases that have seen been overturned.

Hmm... A person claiming to be a scientist who convinces others to do things based on forged data, whose lies had to be refuted by actual scientists. I have no idea how I might turn that into a metaphor.

Have you ever heard of the Freedom Project? Hundreds of people have been falsely imprisoned, often on the strength of forensics. The assumption that we can recreate the past in sufficient detail that we usually understand what happens, no matter how much time has passed, is wrong.

All of those people are acquitted because of forensics. And often enough it is in contradiction to the testimony of intelligent observers whose sworn statements helped convict those people.

Not quite true, my friend Curtis McCarty was freed by the Innocence Project (which, by the way, is the name Opcode was looking for) after they proved that the state of Oklahoma used fake forensic evidence which had been forged by forensic analyst Joyce Gilchrist, who also forged evidence in at least two other cases that have seen been overturned.

Hmm... A person claiming to be a scientist who convinces others to do things based on forged data, whose lies had to be refuted by actual scientists. I have no idea how I might turn that into a metaphor.

It's a good thing you didn't try to turn that into a metaphor, because it wouldn't have ended well for your broader arguments.

Here, let me help you: the scientific community cross checks each other's work, and fraud is quickly ferreted out.

Have you ever heard of the Freedom Project? Hundreds of people have been falsely imprisoned, often on the strength of forensics. The assumption that we can recreate the past in sufficient detail that we usually understand what happens, no matter how much time has passed, is wrong.

All of those people are acquitted because of forensics. And often enough it is in contradiction to the testimony of intelligent observers whose sworn statements helped convict those people.

Not quite true, my friend Curtis McCarty was freed by the Innocence Project (which, by the way, is the name Opcode was looking for) after they proved that the state of Oklahoma used fake forensic evidence which had been forged by forensic analyst Joyce Gilchrist, who also forged evidence in at least two other cases that have seen been overturned.

Hmm... A person claiming to be a scientist who convinces others to do things based on forged data, whose lies had to be refuted by actual scientists. I have no idea how I might turn that into a metaphor.

It's a good thing you didn't try to turn that into a metaphor, because it wouldn't have ended well for your broader arguments.

Here, let me help you: the scientific community cross checks each other's work, and fraud is quickly ferreted out.

That is exactly the point I was making. I was referring to people like Ham's list of "scientists who reject evolution" whose reasoning is based on nothing more than magic and lies. And yet, decades after the issue has been resolved to the satisfaction of the scientific community, the war wages on.

Have you ever heard of the Freedom Project? Hundreds of people have been falsely imprisoned, often on the strength of forensics. The assumption that we can recreate the past in sufficient detail that we usually understand what happens, no matter how much time has passed, is wrong.

All of those people are acquitted because of forensics. And often enough it is in contradiction to the testimony of intelligent observers whose sworn statements helped convict those people.

Not quite true, my friend Curtis McCarty was freed by the Innocence Project (which, by the way, is the name Opcode was looking for) after they proved that the state of Oklahoma used fake forensic evidence which had been forged by forensic analyst Joyce Gilchrist, who also forged evidence in at least two other cases that have seen been overturned.

Hmm... A person claiming to be a scientist who convinces others to do things based on forged data, whose lies had to be refuted by actual scientists. I have no idea how I might turn that into a metaphor.

It's a good thing you didn't try to turn that into a metaphor, because it wouldn't have ended well for your broader arguments.

Here, let me help you: the scientific community cross checks each other's work, and fraud is quickly ferreted out.

That is exactly the point I was making. I was referring to people like Ham's list of "scientists who reject evolution" whose reasoning is based on nothing more than magic and lies. And yet, decades after the issue has been resolved to the satisfaction of the scientific community, the war wages on.

Sorry, the final quote you had up there was in favor of forensics, so I thought you were taking the opposite position. Carry on.

Some scientists do not accept the theory of common descent as the explanation for man's biological existence.

The number for all US scientists and engineers who rejected evolution was about 5%. When you narrow this down to only the scientists that study relevant fields like biology, it's less than 0.15% It's much lower when you figure in the rest of the world.

My point is that it is incorrect to include all scientists under a single label if that label does not describe all of them.

2) Eye witness accounts also need to be corroborated, especially when they make fantastical reading.

I didn't say anything about eye witnesses, or even humans. My emphasis is on the intelligent, orderly and controlled recordings of events, versus inference based on indirect evidence.

Okay, so unless you specifically want to bring up some kind of other being specifically I'm just going to assume you're still talking about humans. Because those are the only known living things that record observations in a controlled and intelligent manor.

Why do we have to assume that the observer is any particular thing beyond being an observer? Your reference to eye witness accounts makes me wonder what else you are assuming, but not stating, about these observers.

The old saying is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

You are changing the subject.

No I'm not. If you want to put forth some kind of claim about the reliability of records, we need to consider the reliability of the records. If you don't like that, please exit the conversation now and save us all some trouble.

Your reply would make logical sense if I were critiquing extraordinary claims at that point, but I wasn't. I was critiquing the pedestrian quality of data obtained during and after events take place.

Besides which, people are prone to false memories and exaggerated accounts.

Irrelevant and not useful to your position even if it were relevant. It's people who are making the observations for the theory of evolution, too. It's people in any case, unless you think scientists are infallible machines.

Scientific observations are replicable. When Michelson and Morley reported that light didn't behave as though being transmitted through a special medium, they made sure that other people could repeat their observations. When Richard Lenski started up his long-term E. coli experiment, he made sure that everybody with the skills to do so could go through his results and look at his samples and confirm whether or not he was giving a reliable account of the observations. And if you need to double-check the measurements of ancient Homo remains to see if anybody is exaggerating their dimensions to make them seem somehow more intermediary between modern humans an ancestral apes, you can do it.

See, this is the shell game that evolutionists love to play. Michelson and Morley observed the interaction of light *as it took place*. Lenski observed E. coli that were present in front of him. The dimensions of fossil remains are present at the time of observation. What is not present are the events that took place when that fossil was a living creature. You cannot observe those events; you can only infer them indirectly, if at all. Evolutionists love to confuse the difference between inference and observation.

Scientists aren't infallible machines, and they are not treated as such. That's why science as a practice is inherently skeptical, self-critical, peer-reviewed, and conducted according to principles of openness and repeatability. Nobody's word is law, but the results and the process matter.

Not all events are repeatable. History is a one-time event. The general principles may continue, but the actual event happens only one time in all eternity. You cannot step twice in the same river; it's always a little different. You cannot repeat the supposed evolution of hominids; that happened one time, and if the process were repeated, the end result would be different each time it was repeated. That's one point about evolution not having a direction. So, you can measure and remeasure a thigh bone as often as you like, but you are never going to see that particular bone regrow from an embryo into an adult. You have to infer what happened, and inference is not observation.

We take all the talk of troop strength from surviving records of battles in the ancient world with a healthy dose of skepticism, for example.

Most of our knowledge of the ancient world ultimately hinge on single accounts that are handed down to us after multiple repetitions. For example, the Battle of Thermopylae changed the course of Western Civilization, but everything we know about it comes to use indirectly from just one man's account. Everything we know about Socrates comes to us indirectly from just a few people. In both of those cases, we don't have the original accounts even of the indirect sources; we rely on copies made centuries after the event. How much more do you think we would know if we had contemporary, orderly and intelligent records? Nye and others who argue like him would leave you to believe that this information is not lost, that we could reconstruct the past adequately just from the fragments that have survived until today.

We actually can do a lot to reconstruct the past. More records would always be helpful and welcome, and they would narrow down the error bars and clear up some of the lingering issues. Again, this is a lot like the forensic science that can determine whether or not a person should be robbed of their freedom.

Have you ever heard of the Freedom Project? Hundreds of people have been falsely imprisoned, often on the strength of forensics. The assumption that we can recreate the past in sufficient detail that we usually understand what happens, no matter how much time has passed, is wrong. The assumption that our inferences about the past are as good as actually observing events as they take place is wrong. Bill Nye is wrong!

The Bible is the best source of knowledge we have of the ancient world. It was written by people who were much closer to the events portrayed, and we have copies of those accounts that are within the time of a human lifetime. That is rarely true of anything else we know of the ancient world.

It's definitely a remarkable collection of accounts and stories, but one that should be taken with a grain of salt. This is true even more clearly to the people that actually study the Bible and other ancient sources. To the majority of them, it doesn't seem as though the Bible is a totally reliable series of first-hand accounts. It's definitely not free from errors or internal inconsistencies. And in places where the records survived because of oral tradition before being written down, the accounts given are clearly at odds with just about everything else available. Somehow the Sumerians and Egyptians failed to notice a global, omnicidal flood occurring during their heydays. You'd think such an event would merit at least a mention in their written records from the time, right? But nope. Apparently Noah's flood came and went without so much as interrupting the marketplaces in those civilizations. It also doesn't match any of the un-written records. We have nothing that fits the pattern expected of a global flood in terms of stratigraphy, geography, distribution of all living things (including humans), etc. There is literally nothing to make you think that a flood happened according to the "account" given in Genesis except the "account" given in Genesis. And this is a problem, because something of that scale must have left enormous amounts of evidence if it actually happened at all. There can be no ambiguity about the signs it would have made. They would be instantly recognizable and distinct. That's just for the Flood. There are other, less glaring but still impossible problems in other areas of the Bible that either don't accord with themselves, don't accord with other records and evidence, or both. All signs point to the Bible being a product of human origination.

Again, all we can do about the past is infer what happened. We cannot recreate it. No number of fossils or archeological artifacts is ever going to substitute for a reliable recorder actually being present when the events took place. So, even though I might not be able to explain the inconsistencies in our understanding of Noah's Flood, all we have to go on are the records we have of those events. You either accept history, or you don't. You cannot prove it wrong or right.

This whole "the past" line of argument is a non-starter. Seriously, can't you see that? Trying to make generalized statements about historical/narrative/scientific/criminological claims when each field of human endeavor has its own frameworks and structure and detailed methodology that's suited to the specific objectives and requirements of its own set of strictures. I mean, come on: the Iliad; the Bible, a bunch of forensic evidence in a trial (and all the legal constrictions that govern evidentiary procedures) compared to reproducible physics and chemistry experiments like Michelson and Morley...who are you kidding? "The past"? Evolutionary biology is based on strict application of the most stringent scientific rules of evidence, experimentation and theory that you're not going to somehow overturn with a bunch of feeble wordplay about "the past." At least the previous creationists on this thread had the fortitude and honesty to talk honestly about faith without stooping to such transparent epistemological games.

It is my opinion that most of what compels the creationists is a hold-over from that time in their childhood when they read fanciful stories that delighted their imaginations. These stories had attractive artwork and illustrations that gave the story a warm and mythical charm. Those stories gave the creationist a feeling of security and well being and continue to do so.To this day you will note how adult creationists love to use illustrations reminiscent of a child's book. The stories or doctrines were also substantiated by their parents and church-going community. So, the creationist was set in stone by this one-two punch. Therefore, it would seem absurd for a thing that makes a person feel so secure and happy be proved wrong or reduced to a merely figurative meaning. It's like a little kid who refused to let go of the Santa Clause myth in adulthood. Even though these beliefs are harmless in themselves, they are unfortunately adhered to as 'facts' and not as the myths that they should be understood as. Moreover, science is fortunately not based on myth or magic. But like the creationist child, the science child is presented with fantastic illustrations of ancient animals etc and will become indoctrinated in the same way the creationist was. Only this time it won't be a myth which to me makes it even more wonderful and open for participation. Now that we have proof we evolved and reality is defining quantum physics through science, the stories of science are seemingly more bizarre than the stories of the Bible. Fact is becoming more unbelievable than fiction in a sense. Science is not redefining reality more than reality is defining science and ultimately belief.

It is my opinion that most of what compels the creationists is a hold-over from that time in their childhood when they read fanciful stories that delighted their imaginations. These stories had attractive artwork and illustrations that gave the story a warm and mythical charm. Those stories gave the creationist a feeling of security and well being and continue to do so.

I doubt it's anything so superficial in most cases. A lot of the most passionate Creationists are "born again" Christians, who only came into their religious fervor after an intense personal experience in their teens or adulthood. You can read about the immensity of emotional transformation they go through in this process by reading any of their testimonials. There's no reason to doubt the sincerity and genuineness of these feelings they describe (whether any of it is attributable to some kind of supernatural agency is another matter). Only after this kind of experience does their opinion become "fixed" on matters like Biblical literalism. I say "fixed" but it's not necessarily permanent, mind you. People have come out of the shell of literalist fundamentalism by genuinely challenging their own convictions and beliefs, exposing themselves to more and broader knowledge and experiences, and remaining curious enough about some subject that the deeper they go, the more they find that the answers don't line up with naive ideas about the Bible's reliability.

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The stories or doctrines were also substantiated by their parents and church-going community. So, the creationist was set in stone by this one-two punch.

An interesting thing about many born-agains is that they're often coming from religious, though not fundamentalist, households. Maybe their family made a point of going to church every Sunday (or at least the major holidays), but other than that their typical childhood experience is one of relaxed and "easy" faith of the kind most non-fundamentalists enjoy. It's not the overriding theme to their entire lives. Then they undergo that experience, usually at the prompting of a revival or something similar, which suddenly kicks their religiosity into high gear. This is another aspect of the situation that isn't really captured by imagining all anti-evolutionists as being the product of brainwashing since birth. Many times the most vehement of them come from this "born again" background instead. Perhaps they see their more liberal upbringing as a tragedy that prevented them from knowing God sooner, and so they react by enthusiastically throwing religion into everything more readily than those who were always surrounded by fundamentalism.

It is my opinion that most of what compels the creationists is a hold-over from that time in their childhood when they read fanciful stories that delighted their imaginations. These stories had attractive artwork and illustrations that gave the story a warm and mythical charm. Those stories gave the creationist a feeling of security and well being and continue to do so.To this day you will note how adult creationists love to use illustrations reminiscent of a child's book. The stories or doctrines were also substantiated by their parents and church-going community. So, the creationist was set in stone by this one-two punch. Therefore, it would seem absurd for a thing that makes a person feel so secure and happy be proved wrong or reduced to a merely figurative meaning. It's like a little kid who refused to let go of the Santa Clause myth in adulthood. Even though these beliefs are harmless in themselves, they are unfortunately adhered to as 'facts' and not as the myths that they should be understood as. Moreover, science is fortunately not based on myth or magic. But like the creationist child, the science child is presented with fantastic illustrations of ancient animals etc and will become indoctrinated in the same way the creationist was. Only this time it won't be a myth which to me makes it even more wonderful and open for participation. Now that we have proof we evolved and reality is defining quantum physics through science, the stories of science are seemingly more bizarre than the stories of the Bible. Fact is becoming more unbelievable than fiction in a sense. Science is not redefining reality more than reality is defining science and ultimately belief.

I think it's vastly more serious. Without the biblical story of creation there's no human soul; there's no afterlife; there's no morality; there's no meaning to death; there's just existential chaos (like the rest of us have to face). Watch that HBO clip with the creationist interviews (linked elsewhere on this thread); it's all there. They talk movingly about cancer deaths and about right and wrong; about how we just can't be "mere animals"; how a universe that "random" and senseless removes the meaning and purpose from everything. These are hardly trivial matters to these people; that's why they fight so hard.

I browsed through all the replies since my last post. It is a lot of material, so perhaps I missed the moment when someone admitted that, yes, information collected at the time an event takes place is higher quality than information collected about the event, say, a million years later. Or, did none of you arrive at that conclusion?

I browsed through all the replies since my last post. It is a lot of material, so perhaps I missed the moment when someone admitted that, yes, information collected at the time an event takes place is higher quality than information collected about the event, say, a million years later. Or, did none of you arrive at that conclusion?

You did miss it.

Information collected at the time COULD be more reliable than looking for clues later, IF AND ONLY IF the collector of the information is reliable, AND that the information has been transmitted through time reliably, AND said account must necessarily be completely consistent with the clues observed in the present.

EDIT: Where "reliable" means unbiased, without error, without delusion, without misinterpretation, etc.

I browsed through all the replies since my last post. It is a lot of material, so perhaps I missed the moment when someone admitted that, yes, information collected at the time an event takes place is higher quality than information collected about the event, say, a million years later. Or, did none of you arrive at that conclusion?

That is only true in situations where the evidence collected at the time is reliable. The Bible is not. Much of what is written is of unknown providence, it has been mistranslated dozens, even hundreds of times since it was first written, much of the time it is second hand accounts or oral traditions later written down. Several books of the new testament were written decades later by people who never met Jesus. Yes, it's within a hundred years of his death, but that's not an eye witness account.

But most importantly, physical evidence is more reliable. Less exact, but more reliable. Physics is really, really hard to fake. If you think a document is forged, carbon dating will tell you what century, potentially even what decade it was made in. If there's an accusation of rape, DNA can say whose sperm it is regardless of witness testimony. Our understanding of what the evidence means may be limited, in the rape scenario the presence of sperm by itself is not necessarily proof of rape, which is why examiners also look for things like vaginal tearing and bruising, and sometimes witness testimony is key to determining whether or not it was consensual sex. It is nevertheless, in nearly all cases, proof positive that the person whose DNA is present did have sex with the accuser, and the motility and health of the sperm can say approximately when that happened.

You however, have taken the position that all firsthand accounts are equal, and that simply isn't true. In Egyptian pyramids, written on the walls are tales of the dead Pharaoh's military accomplishments. These include pronouncements of victories we know did not occur, even battles that never happened. Sometimes people lie, especially when it makes them sound better. Now take that lie through a millennia long game of telephone and tell me if you still think the source is going to be accurate.

I browsed through all the replies since my last post. It is a lot of material, so perhaps I missed the moment when someone admitted that, yes, information collected at the time an event takes place is higher quality than information collected about the event, say, a million years later. Or, did none of you arrive at that conclusion?

Translation: "I have no honest rebuttal of anything written in response to my earlier assertions so I'll just repeat them. Also, I'm making the same assertion in a different comment section regarding another article about the Ham/Nye debate."

I browsed through all the replies since my last post. It is a lot of material, so perhaps I missed the moment when someone admitted that, yes, information collected at the time an event takes place is higher quality than information collected about the event, say, a million years later. Or, did none of you arrive at that conclusion?

That is only true in situations where the evidence collected at the time is reliable. The Bible is not.

Look, I didn't bring up the Bible. You guys did (specifically, Wheels Of Confusion did). My original posts directly addressed Bill Nye's shell game regarding information quality. You all immediately countered hat the Bible is wrong, even though that had nothing to do with my comment. When I pointed out that he was changing the subject, he denied it. But, the fact is, you keep changing the subject, ignoring my points to hear the sounds of your own voices.

I came here because Bill Nye is spreading the lie that all science is historical, implying that what we say about events that took place long before anyone was around to record it is potentially as good as what we say about the most carefully controlled and recorded experiments conducted today. You evolutionists are trying to evade that point, perhaps subconsciously. But, the fact is, the overwhelming majority of what scientists can say about the distant past is, at best, just storytelling.

I don't have a problem discussing the Bible. I do have a problem with people changing the subject to avoid the logical consequences of an argument.

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Much of what is written is of unknown providence, it has been mistranslated dozens, even hundreds of times since it was first written, much of the time it is second hand accounts or oral traditions later written down. Several books of the new testament were written decades later by people who never met Jesus. Yes, it's within a hundred years of his death, but that's not an eye witness account.

These are really bad points, for various reasons. They also don't have a thing to do with my original post.

I have arthritis in my hands. I don't feel like typing out replies to irrelevant points.

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But most importantly, physical evidence is more reliable. Less exact, but more reliable.

Physical evidence is also limited. A bone by itself tells you little about the events that took place around an animal. You could tick off a number of things the bone might imply; climate, temperature, food availability or whatever. But whatever you could find from the bone, it would be much less than what you could find from notes maintained by a contemporary scientist actually observing the animal.

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You however, have taken the position that all firsthand accounts are equal, and that simply isn't true.

I did not. That is the box that you guys keep trying to shove me in, but I have protested it previously. You keep trying to force me to play the role you want me to play, rather than the role I intend to play. I specified from the start that "the quality of information differs when an intelligent observer is present to make orderly and controlled recordings of the event, verses the quality of information derived exclusively by forensic reconstruction." You guys keep trying to change my intelligent and systematic observer into a generic eye witness, so you can argue that eye witnesses are not reliable. It's an old argument, and evolutionists like to make it*, so it doesn't surprise me that you wish I would allow you to make that argument. But, it's a strawman.

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In Egyptian pyramids, written on the walls are tales of the dead Pharaoh's military accomplishments. These include pronouncements of victories we know did not occur, even battles that never happened. Sometimes people lie, especially when it makes them sound better. Now take that lie through a millennia long game of telephone and tell me if you still think the source is going to be accurate.

More irrelevant statements. See, no matter how bad recorded information *could* be, it always has the potential to be better quality and more complete than the information gained by reconstructing events millions of years later.

*More commonly, anyone, but especially atheists, who wants to attack the credibility of the Bible likes to make it.

Have you ever heard of the Freedom Project? Hundreds of people have been falsely imprisoned, often on the strength of forensics. The assumption that we can recreate the past in sufficient detail that we usually understand what happens, no matter how much time has passed, is wrong. The assumption that our inferences about the past are as good as actually observing events as they take place is wrong. Bill Nye is wrong!<snip>

How on earth do they demonstrate that the inmates were falsely imprisoned? (I'm gonna guess that the majority by testing the forensics and finding factors that brought the original conclusion into doubt. In other words the same processes that put them away and the same processes you are contesting validity upon.)Revelation as Ham wants, or by testing the forensics to ensure they were as comprehensive as possible. Or contaminated or even possibly forged for convenience. Gah. Nye was more right than wrong. Though that CSI was a weird argument.

I browsed through all the replies since my last post. It is a lot of material, so perhaps I missed the moment when someone admitted that, yes, information collected at the time an event takes place is higher quality than information collected about the event, say, a million years later. Or, did none of you arrive at that conclusion?

That is only true in situations where the evidence collected at the time is reliable. The Bible is not.

Look, I didn't bring up the Bible. You guys did (specifically, Wheels Of Confusion did). My original posts directly addressed Bill Nye's shell game regarding information quality. You all immediately countered hat the Bible is wrong, even though that had nothing to do with my comment. When I pointed out that he was changing the subject, he denied it. But, the fact is, you keep changing the subject, ignoring my points to hear the sounds of your own voices.

I came here because Bill Nye is spreading the lie that all science is historical, implying that what we say about events that took place long before anyone was around to record it is potentially as good as what we say about the most carefully controlled and recorded experiments conducted today. You evolutionists are trying to evade that point, perhaps subconsciously. But, the fact is, the overwhelming majority of what scientists can say about the distant past is, at best, just storytelling.

I don't have a problem discussing the Bible. I do have a problem with people changing the subject to avoid the logical consequences of an argument.

If you're going to use the pejorative term "evolutionist", you are brining up the bible and creationism every time you use it. Stop using it.

Have you ever heard of the Freedom Project? Hundreds of people have been falsely imprisoned, often on the strength of forensics. The assumption that we can recreate the past in sufficient detail that we usually understand what happens, no matter how much time has passed, is wrong. The assumption that our inferences about the past are as good as actually observing events as they take place is wrong. Bill Nye is wrong!<snip>

How on earth do they demonstrate that the inmates were falsely imprisoned? (I'm gonna guess that the majority by testing the forensics and finding factors that brought the original conclusion into doubt. In other words the same processes that put them away and the same processes you are contesting validity upon.)Revelation as Ham wants, or by testing the forensics to ensure they were as comprehensive as possible. Or contaminated or even possibly forged for convenience. Gah. Nye was more right than wrong. Though that CSI was a weird argument.

Forensics are used to get them out, but that wasn't the point to which I was responding. The claim was that forensics is so good, so reliable, we even use it to deprive people of their liberty in courts of law. My point is that forensics is not so reliable as the other guy was claiming, and maybe the courts of law ought to be more careful about the evidence they accept.

Forensics cannot replace contemporary observation. Contemporary observation always has the potential to provide better quality results than forensics does, because the information is most complete and intact at its moment of ordering than it is after the event. The only reason we can look into the distant past with starlight is because not much altered the starlight before we observed it. The "now" of the event proceeded outward at the speed of light.